United States governments have nothing to offer the world as a model… where’s the NED on this?

Just recently, the city of Baltimore — without any public discussion, without going to the city council, without alerting the public at large — entered into a contract with a company to do persistent aerial surveillance. Police flew loops over parts of Baltimore with wide angle, high-definition cameras, capturing everything that was going on: every person walking down the sidewalk, every car driving down the street. They could press rewind at anytime and have a historical record of people moving around in public spaces.

Vin Weber is a Partner at Mercury. He provides strategic advice to institutions with matters before the legislative and executive branches of the Federal government. Vin has successfully advised numerous clients on matters pertaining to mergers & acquisitions, crisis management, and strategic communications

Vin served in the United States House of Representatives from 1981 to 1993, representing Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District. He was a member of the Appropriations Committee and an elected member of the House Republican Leadership.

Vin is one of the most prominent and successful strategists in the Republican Party and enjoys strong bipartisan relationships across the legislative and executive branches of government. He serves as a trusted advisor to senior officials in the Administration and on Capitol Hill, and has counseled numerous Presidential campaigns. In 2004, Vin was the Bush-Cheney ’04 Plains States Regional Chairman. He has been featured in numerous national publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, National Journal, and the New Republic. Vin is a sought-after political and policy analyst, appearing frequently on major television outlets, including NBC’s Nightly News, News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, ABC’s This Week, the CBS Early Show, Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC. Washingtonian magazine named Vin No. Five in their list of Washington’s 50 top lobbyists.

Mr. Weber is former Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private, nonprofit organization designed to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. He serves on the Board of The Council on Foreign Relations and co-chaired a major independent task force on U.S. Policy Toward Reform in the Arab World with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Vin is a member of the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, and he also serves on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion. He is a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, where he is co-director of the Policy Forum. In addition, Vin is a board member of several private sector and non-profit organizations, including ITT Educational Services, The Lenox Group, and the Aspen Institute where he served on the Institute’s Middle East Strategy Group.

Prior to opening Clark & Weinstock’s Washington office in 1994, Vin was president and co-director with Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Bill Bennett – of Empower America, a public policy advocacy group. Before his Congressional service, he was campaign manager and chief Minnesota aide to Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (1978-1980), and the co-publisher of The Murray County Herald (1976-1978).